Spring Cleaning for Your Blog – Dust off the Cobwebs
Spring cleaning isn’t just for your home. If you’re a blogger, it’s also for your blog and your posts. Much like our homes, blogs need a yearly “deep clean” to be sure the dust is gone and any small cracks in the facade are fixed. These tips on spring cleaning your blog can help you breathe new life into your blog and get you on track for the rest of the year.
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Spring Cleaning – A Deep Clean Your Blog Needs
The following tips serve double duty and are invaluable tools to help you keep your blog rolling along. Not only do these tips help your blog work better, but they also help you get more traffic and generally make you look like a Blogging Superstar.
Check Your Links
Although we always try to link to high quality sites, and thus sites that will be around for the long haul, it’s still a good idea to check the links in your posts once a year. A post with broken links makes you look amateurish and turns off readers. There are multiple tools you can use for this, but if you have WordPress, you can actually use a plugin called Broken Link Checker. However you do it, it’s important that you DO it . I just did this two weeks ago and noted 2 0r 3 blogs that were no longer in existence. Broken links are not good. They are off-putting to readers. Fix them or remove them.
Content is King, but SEO is Queen
Never forget that. You can have absolutely inspired content, but if your SEO is lacking, chances are no one will see it. Go back through all of your post for the year and double check to be sure that the SEO is up to snuff. This should be fairly simple if you already have a plug in like Yoast. But do it anyways. I spend about an hour a week consistently all year checking old posts. I have been blogging since 2009 so there are thousands of posts to revisit.
Pins Drive Traffic
A good image on Pinterest can do wonders for your traffic. So be sure each and every post has a high quality, Pinnable image to attract people to your site. Remember, that longer is better. Small, square, or worse, small and square images are not your friend. Although we are seeing a few changes that way, even so…the goal is pinnable images for longevity and traffic.
Give Those Older Posts Some Love
After you’ve done your spring cleaning on your posts, it’s important to get them back out there again. Use a scheduler – there are a few – to get your posts back out onto Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and other channels too. Hopefully, the shine you put on your posts will deliver! I know I have a few posts that performed even better the second year than they did the first, especially where Printables are concerned.
Check Your Plugins
If you have WordPress, you already know the importance of this. WordPress is incredibly user friendly, but sometimes the plugins designed for it can go a little bit haywire. It’s important to check to ensure that all plugins are working properly, well maintained, and without conflicts during your spring cleaning. Check the date the plugin was last updated and maintained before downloading any new ones.
Get Those Categories and Tags in Order
Sometimes, we get a little impatient or lazy, and we don’t categorize and tag our posts properly. That is no bueno. Without those categories and tags, it makes it monumentally difficult for our readers to find our content within our blog. So go back and ensure that your posts for the year are all categorized and tagged. Too many categories is not good and tags should be specific too. Read this post on lessons at Mom 2.0 for some more about tags.
Spring Cleaning Gets Your Blog Fresh, Clean, and Buzzing
Of course the buzzing part can’t be guaranteed, but if you do a good, deep spring cleaning on your blog, the chances that your traffic improves increase by quite a bit. So get those Pinnable images in there, SEO your posts to the hilt, and get them back out there on social media. It’s a great way to help keep your blog fresh and ready for action.
12 Comments
MONICA Y
I just wish I had more hours in a day, but maybe I will start doing one thing a week and start with checking my links. Any program that you recommend? Then I think I will check the SEO. Thanks for the reminder. We forget to check on these important things. I will also need to get more active on pinterest with my own pins.
Paula
Yes I like broken link checker. It’s easy to use. I do that every few months and then clean up some broken links.
Diana
So many great suggestions! I’m pinning this so I can come back to work on it next week. I definitely need to check links and revive some old posts… going over SEO is a great idea too. It’s a lot of work, but you only get once chance to make a good impression!
Melanie
I feel like that there is so much to keep up with that I just plain can’t keep up with it all! These are all good reminders. I think that I just need to prioritize and decide which ones to focus upon.
Lisa Favre
I have to get more into Pinterest because I know how much of a traffic-driver it could be! Good to know a lot of these “clean up” tips like getting my categories and tags in order. I don’t even want to imagine all of the categories I am hardly using!
Censie Sawyer
Thanks for the ideas. It is so important to keep up with your blog. I often forget to reshare my posts through out the year, I have been working more on this in 2017. Pinterest is my main focus right now. Thank you for this really helpful post. Happy Spring!
Ali Rost
Thank-you for the reminder. Yes .. I definitely could use some spring cleaning when it comes to my blog. In fact .. I just made a list of all of your suggestions and am going to tackle them one by one. One that really stand out? Giving older posts some extra love .. there’s great content hidden in archives!
Bites for Foodies
My husband takes care of this aspect of the blog, and he is constantly checking for updates, broken links, etc. We actually did this ‘spring cleaning’ 5 months ago when we revamped the Blog 😉
Yona Williams
I use Broken Link Checker with my blog, and I love it. One thing I’ve been improving on is my Pins. I’ve been really taking the time to make images more attractive to Pinners – really does boost traffic.
Paula
That is excellent advice.
Tiffany
Awesome tips!! I love recirculating evergreen content. It’s a great way to give a bit of love to an old post and maybe get new views along the way!
madalin stunt cars 2
We actually did this ‘spring cleaning’ 5 months ago when we revamped the Blog ?